** PLEASE, Have your homework out on your desk

and ready for me to stamp! **

Today, you need…

● unit packets
● writing utensil
● highlighter (optional)
Quick Debrief
Tell someone close to you:

How did you use what we learned about New

Historicist/Marxist Theory to analyze The
Giving Tree?

I’ll be coming around to stamp homework.

Old Business
Let’s try to get caught up.
5th Period: Marxist Analysis of Maleficent
6th Period: New Historicist Analysis
Until lions tell their stories,
tales of hunting
will glorify the hunter.

–African Proverb
Postcolonial Theory

An Introduction
 Postcolonial Theory
● Colonialism is a powerful force
o Shapes political features of countries,
identities of colonized and
colonizing people
o Success depends on “othering”
colonized people, seeing them as
dramatically different and lesser

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Postcolonial Theory
● Colonizing and colonized people tell different stories.

Colonizers Colonized People

distort experiences and aim to articulate more
realities of colonized empowered identities
people and reclaim cultures

o ∴ meaning arises in the difference in narratives between

colonizing and colonized people
How can you apply this theory?
Try asking questions like…
1. How are colonizing and colonized people
portrayed?
2. What “Others” are present in the text?
3. What cultural conflicts are present in the
text?
a. How do the colonized culture and traditional
western culture interact?
Quick practice:
Rephrase this sentence from a postcolonial
perspective:

Christopher Columbus discovered America.

Application to Maleficent
1. Who is the colonizing group? Who is the
colonized group?
2. How do different cultural values interact?
3. Sort the main characters into two groups:
colonizing and colonized.
a. Choose one character from each group. How do they
embody the categories of both slave and master?
Critical Race Theory

An Introduction
Critical Race Theory (CRT)
● Recognizes racism as
engrained in “the system”
and society of the United
States
o Individual racists need not
exist for institutional racism
to be pervasive in the
dominant culture
o Existing power structures are
based on embedded white
privilege and supremacy

Source: Rare Historical Photos

Critical Race Theory (CRT)
● Emphasizes the distinction between storytelling
and counter-storytelling
o Importance of individual narrative
o Naming one’s own reality
● ∴ meaning derives from how power structures
continue to marginalize people of color
A few words on privilege…
“I have never understood why some people are lucky
enough to be born with the chance that I had, to have this
path in life and why across the world, there is a woman just
like me, with the same abilities and the same desires and
the same work ethic and love for her family, who would
most likely make better films… only she sits in a refugee
camp… I don’t know why this is my life and that’s hers. I
don’t understand that but I will do as my mother asked, and
I will do the best I can with this life, to be of use.”
—Angelina Jolie
How can you apply this theory?
Try asking questions like…
1. Whose narrative is considered valuable?
2. What privileges do some characters have
that others don’t?
3. How does an individual narrative illuminate
(racial) oppression?
a. Is this literal or metaphorical?
Application to Maleficent
1. What is the established power structure
2. Whose narrative is deemed valuable?
a. Whose narrative has been more valuable in the past?
3. How does Maleficent’s narrative shed new
light on the events of Sleeping Beauty?
Homework
1. (Re)Read Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.
2. Analyze the text using what you’ve learned
about the Postcolonial and Critical Race
Theories and our class models that analyze
Maleficent.